Pragmatic Functions And Textual Functions Of Discourse Connectives In Terms Of Relavance Theory

In modern English a number of little words or phrases like "well" "you know" attached to utterance have developed in to the most frequently used words in discourse. This paper suggests that several such expressions are being classified in to the categories of discourse connectives, i.e. they are coming to play a role in discourse. The account argued here is a unitary one (like some accounts in this volume, for example, Fischer, Nyan, Gupta and Travis) in which inferences (pragmatic) play a more considerable role. And relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), with a view of utterance understanding in which the consideration of cognitive economy extends to utterance interpretation, is found to provide an adequate framework for the study of discourse connectives.The definition of these discourse connectives is one important beginning in investigations of language use. After a theoretical discussion of the definition of discourse connectives and their relevance to natural language processing, we focus on the identification of discourse connectives in communication. While it is widely agreed that discourse connectives play a variety of important roles in utterance generation and interpretation, there is disagreement in regard to such fundamental issues as how the discourse connetive class should be decided, what type of meaning they express, and the sense in which such expressions may be said to relate elements of discourse.In this paper, the effects that discourse connective have upon the interpretation of discourse still remain to be a focus of present research. On one hand, discourse connectives have a constraining function, which constrain the interpretation process by guiding the hearer towards the intended context and contextual effects. On the other hand, discourse connectives play a facilitating role, the speaker aims to ensure the intended interpretation, making the hearer's job as easy as possible. With respect to the last question, this paper also argues that discourse connectives are vitally importtant to such issues as translation, reading comprehension and listening comprehension, for the sake of light they throw on communication.